Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The
detective pulled his chair closer to Joe, the mentally ill suspect
sitting alongside him in the small, windowless room. Joe kept denying that he had killed his mother, but the detective wasn’t buying it. Looking Joe straight in
the eye, he leaned in and said:

“Look,
Joe, your mother was a cancer. Think about all of the bad things you
told us she did. She hurt people. You should be proud of what you did.
Seriously! She was a problem, and you eliminated that problem. That was
the right thing to do. It took a hell of a lot of courage. I'm sure
other people in the family were fed up with her, too, but they didn't
have the balls to do what you did."

Does this sound like a far-fetched thing for a cop to say to a criminal
suspect, especially about his own mother?

Well, it isn't. This is an almost-verbatim
transcription that I made from the audiotape of the interrogation.

After
being involved in dozens of similar cases, the gambit was no longer
shocking to me. It comes from the Reid method that is now used almost
universally by American police. The idea is to offer the suspect a
rationale that minimizes his moral culpability for the offense – while
carefully avoiding any minimization of legal responsibility.

Critical awareness growing over flawed Reid technique

The
Reid technique, the brainchild of John E. Reid and Associates, is
fundamental to modern interrogation techniques. But it’s getting greater
scrutiny in recent years thanks to growing awareness of the problem of
false confessions. Of the convicted people who have been conclusively
cleared by DNA evidence, about one out of four had confessed to the
crime – often due to clever ruses designed and promoted by the Reid
school. The case of the Central Park Five, featured in an excellent book
as well as a powerful new documentary, is one such case.

Adrian Thomas in interrogation room

Another
alarming case getting critical attention at the moment is that of
Adrian P. Thomas, who was interrogated for 10 hours by police in upstate
New York while his infant son lay in the hospital, misdiagnosed
with a skull fracture. The detectives pulled out all the stops, lying
to him about the evidence, threatening to arrest his wife, promising him
leniency, speculating about “repressed” memory, and adding a sense of
urgency by saying the doctors needed information from him in order to save his
dying son.

Thomas
ultimately confessed to a crime that probably never happened at all.
Both the doctor who contacted police and the county medical examiner had
failed to detect the massive blood and brain infection that likely
killed the youngster. Although Mr. Thomas almost immediately recanted
his confession, it was too late; the damning videotape was played almost
in its entirety at his trial.
Thomas, who is African American, was convicted after the trial judge
refused to let defense expert witness Richard Ofshe testify about the
psychological tactics that can cause an innocent person to confess.

The
case was the subject of a critically acclaimed, jaw-dropping
documentary, Scenes of a Crime, which I highly recommend. Just last
month, after the release of the film, New York’s highest court
overturned Mr. Thomas’s conviction, calling the interrogation
procedures “coercive” and the confession “involuntary.” Thomas faces a
retrial at which the confession will be excluded, leaving no evidence
connecting him to a crime. New Yorker exploration

The latest critical attention is a lengthy essay in the influential New Yorker magazine. Author Douglas
Starr describes his adventure undergoing the Reid training, and
presents critical research casting doubts on both the fairness and the
accuracy of the method.The
essay, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in the topic,
explores the research of leading academics including Saul Kassin,
Richard Leo, Aldert Vrij
and Melissa Russano. These scholars agree that the Reid method is great
at eliciting self-incriminating statements, but not so good at
distinguishing true confessions from false ones.

Kassin, a
prominent expert and a frequent media critic, believes the Reid
Technique is inherently coercive. As Starr explains his position:

“The
interrogator's refusal to listen to a suspect's denials creates
feelings of hopelessness, which are compounded by the fake file and by
lies about the evidence. At this point, short-term thinking takes over.
Confession opens something of an escape hatch, so it is only natural
that some people choose it.”

Time to move on?

Just
as psychologically coercive techniques replaced the physical coercion
of the olden days’ “third degree,” even within the U.S. law enforcement
community some think that the Reid technique has outlived its time.

In
Britain, Canada and some other countries, police have switched to less
coercive interviewing procedures, such as PEACE, which stands for
Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure,
Evaluate.

The
method is radically different, in that rather than trying to entrap a
suspect using falsehoods and psychological ploys, the detective
approaches the interview almost like a journalist, asking open-ended
questions to get the whole story, and then following up by going back
over the story looking for inconsistencies.

Although
some U.S. law enforcement leaders are working to develop similar
approaches, Kassin told Starr he is skeptical of wholesale change: “The
culture of confrontation, he feels, is too embedded in our society.”

I
tend to agree. If anything, as in the example at the
outset of this post, I am seeing the Reid techniques taken to more and
more extreme levels. That's probably the results of courts' tacit encouragement, in refusing to ban deceit and in the watering
down of suspects’ Miranda rights until they are a joke.

Sadly, police interrogations these days often look and feel more like cynical game-playing than a process with any integrity. For that, Lady Justice weeps.

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Karen Franklin, Ph.D. is a forensic psychologist and adjunct professor at Alliant University in Northern California. She is a former criminal investigator and legal affairs reporter. This blog features news and commentary pertaining to forensic psychology, criminology, and psychology-law. If you find it useful, you may subscribe to the newsletter (above). See Dr. Franklin's website for more information.

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